Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Xerox.

I agree that good copy is paramount and that is what I do, making sure it reads well and builds trust and interest.

I'm going through my clients' (and my own) website in a schedule of continuous improvement. I realise there's no big wins, just a lot of little steps and am trying to tweak them to get the best possible result.

I would like to know your thoughts on optimising a page for a keyword phrase that is not how you would normally write it.

When someone searches they tend to use the (no pun intended) key words relating to their query rather than natural language. Using these keywords leads to copy that doesn't read well but not doing so gets you a poor mark on On-page graders like Moz.

My clients target an international market but are region specific so, for example, I might want to optimise for 'safari lodge zambia' or variations of that.

Alternatively it might be optimising for a specific tour so the keyword might include a region highlight and the 'safari' or 'tour' qualifier which again can sometimes be problematic. In the title, I would normally use the name of the tour | company name but that may not match an exact likely keyword search and in the main copy/description it would be unnatural to incorporate the keyword phrase.